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Most of these people, I’ve never actually met. I know them by the content they publish online. I appreciate every last word of it.

Sometimes while chatting with friends, I’m struck at just how much online “curating” I’ve done over the years—following (and unfollowing) people who inspire me to be better—and just how much value I get from these influencers. Most people haven’t had time to sift out true value from the millions of voices screaming online for attention.

To that end, here’s a list of five online influencers whose content I find inspiring. These are people whose blogs and tweets I read, whose videos I watch, and whose podcasts I listen to on a regular basis.

Ed Latimore. I follow him on Twitter. A fresh perspective on work and taking responsibility for yourself.

Naval Ravikant. I follow him on Twitter. The more I think about this particular thread, the more it changing my perspective on my work.

Gary Vaynerchuk. Soak up his stuff. It’s deep and profound, if you listen closely. Especially when he talks about patience. I love this clip.

Scott Adams. His politics aside, Scott’s thinking about systems vs. goals changed the way I think about how to make progress in my life and career.

Bonus #6: My friends Gret, Dave and Spencer. These guys inspire me more than than everyone else on this list, combined. It’s because we stay in contact with each other religiously. Extreme accountability on all things social, spiritual, entrepreneurial, and financial.

I read Rob Bell’s What Is the Bible?last week. Wrote a 200-word review of it last night. I’m going to write a 200-word review for every book I read the rest of this year—my way of keeping myself accountable to actually read a book every week.

That said, Rob Bell is interesting to me. I like him. I like his perspective. I once wrote about him in college when everyone around me, at my conservative Christian college, was pretty opposed to his ideals. Here’s a fair and critical review of the book I just read.

This week I’m reading Brave New World by Aldous Huxley. I was supposed to have read this in the 12th grade (I even wrote a report on it), but only skimmed it. Sorry Mr. Beavers.

I have a course coming out soon at Highbrow. Topic: How to run a market research survey. It’s based on a piece I wrote for Startup Grind last October. It’s aimed at aspiring and early-stage entrepreneurs.

I’ve been thinking about this piece ever since I read it. An enlightening and convincing piece on how technology and information overload has yet-unknown, and likely very bad, consequences for our minds. Though the author’s proposed solutions are a bit hackneyed, they’re true nonetheless—especially as regards the wellness vs. medicine dichotomy.

When you do this, the Scriptures turn from stale to sacred—inspired not just by definition, but truly and deeply ﻿inspirational.

Bell inspires this perspective with examples. From Moses’ organ to Ehud’s knife to the three apocalypses, the Bible is full of stories that mean so much more than we’ve settled for. So much more than Bible-tract bullet points—platitudes that make the whole thing seem so unrelatably dull.

The book is as useful for well-read Christians as for skeptics. Bell adeptly addresses both audiences with the same language (that this is possible is perhaps the most alarming, but pertinent, lesson of this book). His goal is to help us read the Bible better—prior convictions notwithstanding or particularly relevant.

This is what makes the book powerful.

Bell’s perspective is refreshing. No labels, no jargon. The Scriptures, he argues, defend their own inspiration. No need for artfully-defined, highfalutin ideals (inerrancy, infallibility) to see that this ancient library is worth reading over and over.

I’m going to try and read one book per week for the rest of the year. Last week was The Exorcist. This week, What is the Bible?(Rob Bell, 2017). I’m saying this here in order to keep myself accountable.

I’m shifting my work from Haven Insights to PeopleFish. This is a sort-of rebrand. It’s been a long-time coming. Bottom-line is my team and I are focusing less on long-term, traditional quantitative market research projects in favor of our unique, turnkey, startup-focused survey offer. It’s more in line with my personal goals, and I consider it a more scale-able model.

I had a piece on startup market research published by Startup Grind last Friday. Would appreciate your “applause.”

I’m increasingly convinced that my smartphone use is killing my brain—more specifically, my ability to focus, de-stress, and think deeply without getting distracted. And call me crazy, but I consistently feel tired when I’m not browsing on my phone. It’s like my body depends on social feed-driven dopamine rushes to keep my mind from trancing out. So I’m not using it anymore before 8 am or after 8pm. Again, saying this here only to keep myself accountable.

You probably don’t know when they’re happening. You see them only in retrospect.

But all the time—every single week—you make decisions that constitute some big turning point in your life.

The mind can never foresee it’s own advance.

F.A. Hayek

Since this is true, it means right now matters. Right now could be the biggest moment in your life. The decision you’ll make after reading this post to push even harder, today, toward your goals, could one day be what you consider the most important decision you ever made.

This post–any post–could be the most impactful thing you ever read. That all depends on what you do with it.

There are some people who believe this—that success is the sum of all small decisions made over the course of many years, even decades. Then there are some people who don’t, and who are wrong about what success looks like.

Until you truly believe, deep down, that success is attainable, and that it’s up to you, and that the first step is pushing harder in this very moment, you’re probably going nowhere fast.

Success happens in discrete, singular moments. One by one by one by one.

A friend and entrepreneur I respect once told me that to begin succeeding in life, I should start by fixing that annoying leak in my bathroom faucet. Forget forecasting, selling, strategizing. Start with things that need to be fixed. Start with the one thing you know you ought to do, but haven’t done yet.

“If you are faithful in little things, you will be faithful in large ones.”

This Jaron Lanier interview is one of the most fascinating things I've read this year. Thanks to Rod Dreher for pointing it out.

The argument is that social media hates your soul. And it suggests that there’s a whole spiritual, religious belief system along with social media like Facebook that I think people don’t like. And it’s also fucking phony and false. It suggests that life is some kind of optimization, like you’re supposed to be struggling to get more followers and friends. Zuckerberg even talked about how the new goal of Facebook would be to give everybody a meaningful life, as if something about Facebook is where the meaning of life is.

It suggests that you’re just a cog in a giant global brain or something like that. The rhetoric from the companies is often about AI, that what they’re really doing — like YouTube’s parent company, Google, says what they really are is building the giant global brain that’ll inherit the earth and they’ll upload you to that brain and then you won’t have to die. It’s very, very religious in the rhetoric. And so it’s turning into this new religion, and it’s a religion that doesn’t care about you. It’s a religion that’s completely lacking in empathy or any kind of personal acknowledgment. And it’s a bad religion. It’s a nerdy, empty, sterile, ugly, useless religion that’s based on false ideas. And I think that of all of the things, that’s the worst thing about it.

I mean, it’s sort of like a cult of personality. It’s like in North Korea or some regime where the religion is your purpose to serve this one guy. And your purpose is to serve this one system, which happens to be controlled by one guy, in the case of Facebook.

It’s not as blunt and out there, but that is the underlying message of it and it’s ugly and bad. I loathe it, and I think a lot of people have that feeling, but they might not have articulated it or gotten it to the surface because it’s just such a weird and new situation.

Less than .0001% of American kids since 2000 have been injured in a school shooting.

Yes, it's tempting to think that "one is too many." But the fact is, kids are safer at school than almost anywhere else. Certainly safer than they are at home.

Don't buy into the hysteria. It sounds horrible to say, but the fact is, the United States simply does not have a "school shooting problem." Take a look at this map. Then think about the size of America's student population (currently 55 million).

As with anything, this is about percentages. Ratios. Trade-offs. Thinking about gun violence this way will lead to the best outcomes for everyone.

Less than .0001% of students injured in school shooting. Is comprehensive gun control affecting tens of millions of people really a proportionate response? No.

On that note, does the US even have a general (not just school) gun problem? The statistics here are often misleading. In 2013, for example, around 33,000 people were killed by firearms in the US. 2/3 of these were suicides. That leaves 11,000 people killed by firearms that year by someone other than themselves.

That's question #1 to ask when viewing gun stats: Do these figures include suicides?

On to "mass shootings." Since 1980, "mass shootings" represent less than 1% of all gun-related deaths. And that's with a more liberal definition of "mass shooting" than I think most would agree with. It's based purely on numbers, and doesn't account for whether someone killed was involved with illegal activity (i.e. drugs) that, in some way, prompted the violence.

The type of mostly-random mass shooting that took place in Parkland? Almost never happens. "Indiscriminate rampages in public places resulting in more than four victims killed" happens less than a dozen times per year, using almost any definition of "public places."

That's question #2 to ask when viewing gun stats: What percent of these figures comprise "mass shootings" of the sort that sparks our gun control debates?

Mass shootings are rare. Statistically, your kids are in almost no danger of being shot at school. They're far more likely to be shot at home.

Here's me at Startup Grind on rules for an effective customer feedback survey.

I'm a survey guru. I've designed, programmed, fielded and analyzed more surveys than I can count. As usual, when I feel I've boiled things down enough into a simple formula, I like to codify those guidelines in articles like this one.

Hope this helps someone out there. If your business isn't running customer feedback surveys now, you should be—there's really no excuse.

On that note, I attended X4 Summit in Salt Lake City earlier this month. Great event. Highly recommend it. Qualtrics' (the event host/sponsor) whole spiel is experience management, or XM, as the catch-all concept behind the merging of marketing with brand management with market research with UI design with R&D…you get the picture. Qualtrics' CEO Ryan Smith pitched a binary perspective on business data—operational data vs. experience data. Both have their roles, but experience data is what drives growth—especially for smaller and/or growing firms. Operational data (margins, transactions, etc.) enables arbitrage and "land-grabbing," but experience data opens new doors and drives actual growth in things like brand awareness, market share, and other customer-focused metrics.

That said, the experience management concept itself is a tough sell, in my view. It's a bit overgeneralized (as seen in the wide variety of topics and panels at X4). Good thinking about business, I think, is more particularizing than generalizing. Yes, the role of marketers can overlap big time with the roles of brand managers, market researchers and/or UI designers. But that's obvious. It's knowing how these things differ, and thereby where to laser-focus resources, that gives businesses a leg up.

Synthesizing and aggregating customer "experience" data is great (and fun), but excelling here really only benefits big brands with lots of moving parts. I can't count how many times I've delivered hard-to-get, high-level market research findings to companies who really have no resources to do anything with that kind of data—companies who are better off to hyper-focus (for now) on excelling at just one of the several roles mentioned above.

(In other words, don't worry about synthesizing your customer experience data if you know of obvious, needed improvements in your marketing or branding. Fix those things first with the intuition that got you where you're at today. Then study your meta-data.)

But the event itself was superb. Snapped this panorama of the Warehouse Party (that's Tony Hawk's half-pipe).